“Worse than you did. Mac, don’t be dense. Fogarty wanted to make the trip all right. And he’s making it—without you. You’re older and you out-rank him. You’d have been the leader. Now, he keeps any credit for himself.”
“Paul? Do a thing like that. I don’t believe it.”
But he did. He went silent for hours, cracking his finger joints in the way that I hated and looking sideways out of the ship at the eldritch plume of glowing plasma that trailed away behind us.
And me? I ought not to say it, but I was rather pleased. I mean, McAndrew had been jealous, jealous of someone I hadn’t much liked at the time and hadn’t seen or heard of in fifteen years. I thought that was rather sweet.
No, it’s not quite the same as fine jewels or bouquets of flowers. But once you forget about his being a genius, McAndrew’s a simple man. When it comes to compliments I settle for what I can get.
McAndrew had known that several of the Arks had been launched far north of the ecliptic when he played me Fogarty’s message. He did the background research before we left, and it was all in the Merganser’s data banks.
I sifted through the material one morning, while McAndrew sat in a habitual stupor of advanced physics and the ship raced out toward the fiery point of the Cassiopeia supernova. The Sun had already shrunk behind us to a point of light and although we were crowding light-speed we didn’t seem to be moving.
There had been seventeen Arks, but only four of them were candidates for what we were seeking. Each of them was different and distinctive. You might expect that. Any group of people which decides to leave the rest of humanity and heads off on a one-way trip to the stars is likely to be a little odd.
The Ark of the Evangelist had set out to spread its version of the Word of God among the stars. It contained four thousand followers of the philosopher Socinus, which was probably all of them. The Word, from what I could see of it in the data base, was likely to baffle any alien who encountered it. Certainly, the Word baffled me.
The Ark of the Evangelist was equipped with unusually powerful communications equipment, able to beam messages ahead so that their ultimate arrival at another stellar system would be expected. The same equipment would, of course, also be able to send messages back toward Sol. None had ever been received, unless Paul Fogarty had picked up the first.
The Cyber Ark had no interest in evangelism. It had headed out toward Cassiopeia, but any direction would have done equally well. The Ark held two thousand computer specialists and the most advanced computing equipment that the Solar System could produce. The Ark’s inhabitants were united in their disdain for the rules that limited the development of machine intelligence. They had vowed to produce real artificial intelligence, a true AI, and they claimed to know how exactly to do it. Their goal was an AI far beyond the known limits of either humans or machines. If they felt in a generous mood when they were done, well, they just might tell Earth when the work was finished.
Big talk. But if they had been successful, they had sent back no word in the fifty-nine years since they flew away from the Solar System.
Then there was the Ark of Noah. Its colonists had become convinced from their analysis of ancient religious writings that Armageddon and the end of Earth were close to hand. They had no faith in the survival of the colonies we had established on Mars, Titan, or Ceres. Inside the two-kilometer sphere of their ark, formed from a hollowed-out asteroid, they had tried to include a pair of every Earth species of plant and animal. Impossible, in practice—we were up to four million species of insects, and still counting. But the Ark of Noah gave it a good, all-out try, packing in a handful of every life-form they could find. They took liberties with the number of humans, two hundred instead of Noah’s single family; but somebody had to manage the Ark’s life-support systems, if and when things went out of whack.
My own money was on the Amish Ark. When a group which shuns most forms of mechanical systems sets off into the void in as fundamentally high tech a structure as an artificial world, integration problems and equipment failures loom large as a source of possible trouble. The surprise was that the Ark had gone as far out as it had without killing everybody on board. The passengers—eight thousand of them at takeoff from Earth orbit, according to the roster—had been lucky to be able to send their weak call for help. Apparently they also didn’t know much about electronic signaling. Otherwise they’d have realized that only someone close to the Ark, or at a solar focus where the strength of any message was gravitationally concentrated, could possibly have heard them.
Of course, we were listening for a direct signal now, with the most sensitive equipment we had been able to place on board the Merganser. We knew the general direction of the lost Ark, and an approximate distance; but we might well be off a few hundred million kilometers, one way or the other.
After we came to our best estimate of the origin of the signal, we spent the next few days moving position, listening, and moving again. Nothing. I began to be discouraged. Not so McAndrew.
“Jeanie,” He said, “the chain of logic that led us here is clear and unbreakable. Keep looking, and we’ll find an Ark.”
“The Amish.”
“You’re the one saying that, not me. But whichever Ark it is, once we find it we’ll be able to tell them that help is on the way.”
I was glad to hear him put it like that. Director Rumford couldn’t have been more explicit in our final meeting before we left the Institute.
“I’m approving the flight of the Merganser as an exploration mission,” he had said. “That’s the most I can do, because the Institute has no responsibility for search-and-rescue operations. I think you have a long shot—a very long shot—at finding someone in trouble. But remember that you are not a rescue party. There are only the two of you, in a small ship without special equipment. You are not trained for space rescue. If you find someone out there in trouble, call me and come back here. No heroics. No attempts at inspired space-engineering solutions. Leave that work to the specialists. Understand?”
“Of course.” McAndrew had agreed instantly, but I knew the man. He was itching to be on his way, and to get Rumford’s consent for the mission he’d have said anything.
Now, with the ark possibly no more than a few hours ahead, I was glad to hear him proposing talk rather than action.
Just to be sure, I rubbed in Director Rumford’s order one more time. “The colonists don’t seem to be in any great hurry for help, if they send only one message a year. A good thing, too—we have no room on Merganser for anyone else. If it comes to an all-up rescue mission, the United Space Federation will fly a whole fleet out this way.”
As I said that, I was secretly convinced that our whole journey would prove a waste of time. Before we left the Institute we had installed a loud signaling system on the Merganser, and for the past two days we had blared word of our presence and our location into the empty sky ahead of us.
Result: nothing.
The people on the Ark were deaf, or their receiving equipment was out of action; or maybe the Ark was over on the other side of the Sun, hundreds of billions of kilometers away, wandering around where Paul Fogarty had picked up the original signal.
We had reduced speed and turned off the balanced drive. At my insistence we had also switched off every possible source of electronic noise and were gliding forward through the void like a dead ship.
It was as well that we were so silent. Even with our electronic ears wide open, the Mayday signal that came in was barely above threshold. It was also well off to one side.
“That’s it!” Our receiving system automatically tuned to the direction of the source, and now McAndrew increased the gain to maximum. It didn’t help. Instead of a faint voice almost lost in white noise, we heard a loud voice equally unintelligible amid a thunderstorm of static.
“…receiving—input…signal…assistance—urgent…” And then, the first direct evidence that they had heard us. “…send…who you…”
�
��I have direction and distance,” I said. “Three-twenty-one million kilometers. Send a signal saying that we hear them. Tell them who we are, say we are on the way. Tell them they’ll hear nothing more from us for a while—we can’t send when the drive is on.”
“Aye.” McAndrew was peering uselessly out of the observation port, as though he might catch a glimpse of something hundreds of millions of kilometers off in the distance. “Looks like things are going worse for them, they say it’s urgent. Let’s see, three hundred and twenty-one million. Can the Merganser beat a hundred and ten gees?”
“Not with me on board it can’t. We keep it safe, Mac—we don’t want anyone having to come and rescue us.”
He scowled, but finally he said, “Fair enough.” I don’t know if he did the arithmetic in real time, or if he had stored in his head some kind of table of time against distance and acceleration, but he went on at once, “I’ll tell them we’ll be there in ten hours. That will give us twenty-five minutes for turnover before we start to decelerate. Should be ample. Set it up, Jeanie.”
I had to make one more decision before I could program the drive. What should we assume about target motion? If it was an Ark, how was it moving?
I worried for a few seconds, then decided that it didn’t matter. If the Ark were in free-fall toward the Sun, or if it were in stable orbit around it, that made little difference. The speed would be no more than about a kilometer a second. We could fine tune for that at the end, in a minute or two of accelerated flight.
As soon as McAndrew had sent our message we were on the way. We settled in for a few hours of rest and a quiet gloat. In spite of my warning that this wasn’t a rescue mission, I must admit that I was feeling cocky. We had flown out blind, far from the Sun to where no one but McAndrew had thought of looking. And against all the odds we had found a lost Ark.
A little feeling of self-satisfaction seemed to be in order.
Asteroids are the way that snowflakes are said to be, no two the same. I can’t speak for snowflakes, because I’ve only seen snow twice in my life. But I can vouch for the variability of asteroids. They come in all sizes and every imaginable shape.
That, of course, presents problems to any self-respecting engineer. Ordinary ships can be grown on an assembly line to a common template, a hundred or a thousand of them identical. Asteroids are a wilderness of single instances. Faced with the conversion of an asteroid to a space habitat, an engineer can only standardize so far.
All the Arks had begun life as asteroids roughly spherical and roughly two kilometers in diameter. Hollowing out their interiors and extracting useful metals and minerals followed a standard procedure. At that point, however, the paths for the creation of individual Arks diverged. Thickness of external walls, size and type of interior structures, on-board life forms, mineral reserves, illumination, hydroponics, computer controls, communication antennas, lifeboats, all had to be designed to order. Which was just as well, because small animals and bugs acceptable to—even required by—the Ark of Noah would be considered disgusting vermin by the Cyber Ark or the Ark of the Evangelist. On the other hand, the Cyber Ark wanted computing equipment involved in everything, while the Amish Ark would have been happy with no computers at all.
Except for the communication antennas, none of these differences showed on the outside. McAndrew and I knew that, but all the same we peered curiously at our display screens as the object ahead of the Merganser grew steadily from a tiny point of light almost lost against the background of stars, to a defined disk, and finally to a lumpy Christmas ornament adorned with the bright spikes and knobs of gantries, antennas, thrusters, exit locks, lifeboat davits, space pinnaces, and docking stations.
“This is the Merganser, at eighteen kilometers and closing.” I sent the signal, wondering why the Ark ahead had stopped broadcasting its Mayday. “Are you receiving us?”
I hardly expected an answer, so the woman’s voice that replied within seconds was a surprise.
“We are—receiving—your messages,” she said. Her speech was jerky, as though she was hard-pressed to force out each word. “We need your—assistance. Urgently. Approach—this world—and—come aboard.”
McAndrew leaned across and turned off the microphone. “Damn it, Jeanie, what are we going to do? They think we can help them, and we can’t. This ship doesn’t have the resources.”
“We knew that before we started,” I said. “Mac, the only thing we can do is find out what’s wrong, and send a message back to Director Rumford. He’ll have to take it from there.”
I turned the microphone back on. “The Merganser is a small experimental ship. We can’t do much to help. What sort of assistance do you need?”
The woman said again, just as though she had not heard me, “We need—your—urgent assistance. Approach—and come aboard. An entry port is—already—open. Proceed through to the—interior.”
We had been closing steadily as we spoke until the Ark loomed to fill the sky ahead. The blue-white glare of the Cassiopeia supernova, far brighter in this location than our own diminished Sun, threw hard shadows on the external surface of the converted asteroid. I could see the trusses of each individual gantry and the lattice work of the robot arms that handled external cargo loads. An entry lock formed a dark well next to one giant manipulator.
I stopped the Merganser two kilometers short of the Ark. “This is as far as we go.”
“Jeanie!” He was outraged. “We can’t find out what their trouble is unless they tell us, and they don’t seem able to. We have to go inside. There’s no possible danger. None of the Arks had a weapons system.”
“I know that.” I wondered why I was feeling uneasy, and relented. After all, even if I were the captain this had been his idea and it was really his expedition. “All right. We can go closer if we use suits. But the ship stays here.”
“Sure.” McAndrew was already moving across to the locker. By the time that I had sent word back to the Institute giving our current location and status, he was suited up and in the air lock.
“Go slow, Mac,” I said. “There’s no hurry. Don’t go outside without me!”
He took no notice. As I say, he has never learned the meaning of the word restraint. The air lock was cycling before I had my suit out of the locker.
I watched McAndrew as I removed my loose outer clothing and slipped the suit over my legs and lower body. He was outside, and moving toward the Ark. I was glad to see how slowly he was taking it. I could be in my own suit, through the lock, and catch up with him well before he reached the Ark.
In the final moment before I placed my suit helmet in position, I noticed something off toward the left-hand limb of the Ark. It was shaped like a crumpled and deformed space pinnace. Instead of hanging in the usual davits it sat between the metal jaws of a cargo manipulator.
“Mac, take a look on the Ark at about ten o’clock.” I spoke over my suit’s radio link. “See it? Looks like a lifeboat. Head over there, and I’ll follow you.”
I set the Merganser to hold position a steady two kilometers from the Ark and headed for the air lock. It was long experience, not intelligence or sense of foreboding, that led me to tuck a power laser into a pocket on my suit. Once outside, I found myself doing what I had told McAndrew not to do—hurrying.
As I thought, it was a lifeboat. McAndrew turned as I came closer. I could not see his face behind the visor, but his voice was unsteady.
“Take a look through the ports, Jeanie. There’s been a terrible accident here.”
Rather than doing what he suggested I moved along to the middle of the lifeboat. It had been torn open by the jaws of the cargo manipulator, which still held it. I could enter the little ship through a great two-meter gash in the hull.
The bodies had been there for a long time; twenty-eight of them, dry corpses desiccated by years of exposure to vacuum. Not one had on a space suit.
“They must have been trying to go and get help,” McAndrew muttered. He had entered the lifebo
at right behind me. “They lost control before they were even on their way, and ran into the cargo manipulator.”
“It looks that way.” I was puzzled and disturbed. Even an inexperienced pilot would know not to turn on the engines until the lifeboat had drifted well clear of the Ark. Otherwise, you would endanger the Ark as well as yourselves. Only the Amish, after a lifetime of shunning all modern mechanical devices, would make such a basic and fatal blunder.
But the Amish, more than anyone else, would not have abandoned the bodies of their dead. They would have recovered them and provided appropriate space burial. If they had not, that meant they could not. For many years—how old were those freeze-dried corpses?—the surviving Amish must have been confined to the body of the Ark and unable to venture into space.
That had me equally confused. Every Ark carried hundreds of space suits. If the Amish were not able to come outside, then how could McAndrew and I go in? Approach, the woman said, and come aboard. An entry port is already open. And it was. We had seen it, standing wide next to another of the manipulators.
McAndrew went on, “The accident was unlucky, and not just for them. It was unlucky for everyone else on the Ark, too.”
He was leaving the lifeboat and heading on toward the gaping lock. I followed, more slowly. A lifeboat was meant for use close to a planet. What dreadful danger would make you launch one so far away from any world, where the chance of survival was negligible? One basic question was unanswered, despite our questions to our female contact: What had gone wrong?
The Amish disdained some forms of technology, but they were hard-working and hard-headed people. Their Ark, more than any other, had been designed to survive and operate using minimal resources. But more and more I had the feeling—a ridiculous feeling, given that I had talked to someone on the Ark within the past hour—that the structure in front of me was a dead hulk.
McAndrew was already inside the lock, using his suit lights because the Cassiopeia supernova no longer provided illumination. Following, I saw that the inner door was also open. It suggested that the whole corridor beyond was airless.
The Compleat McAndrew Page 30